St. Paul the Eccentric

David Mills on Those Who Would Separate Jesus from St.
Paul

In my files is the newsletter of a famous Episcopal parish in New York City.
On one page is a sermon by its recently retired rector, in which he spoke of
worship as “but the means of bringing us close to the source of our faith,
and that source is very simply Our Lord Jesus Christ.” He then not only
proclaimed his belief in the Virgin Birth but in the Immaculate Conception as
well.

On the facing page was a response by the parish’s trustees to the assertion
of the 1998 Lambeth Conference (the last meeting of the world’s Anglican
bishops) that homosexual practices are “incompatible with Scripture.”
The trustees declared their parish “a faith community in which membership
and opportunity for lay and ordained ministry shall not be restricted on the
basis of sexual orientation.” By “orientation,” let me be
clear, they meant to include the practice thereof.

And in his sermon, the former rector himself promoted the approval of homosexuality,
as well as the ordination of women. These innovations, apparently in contradiction
to the teaching of St. Paul, he must have believed expressed the will of “the
source of our faith.”

Separating Gospels from Epistles

What, one thinks, have we here? On the one hand a very, very high view not only
of the Incarnation but also of our Lord’s mother herself, as deeply traditionalist
as anyone could wish, and on the other hand a willful rejection of Scripture’s
moral teaching.

This is a now common problem in Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant:
the Christian who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God, and who also almost completely rejects the unfashionable
teachings of the Bible found outside the four Gospels. As our society becomes
more and more interested in “spirituality,” we find more and more
people talking in very traditional terms about Jesus while assuming that the
Scripture in which he is revealed has nothing to say about any part of their
lives they wish to keep to themselves.

These people in effect separate the Gospels they accept—partly because
they have not read them closely—from the Epistles they reject. It is usually
St. Paul whose words they reject. The other New Testament writers they usually
ignore, perhaps because they did not say anything so offensive to modern ears
as St. Paul’s instructions on men, women, and sexuality. They do not reject
even Paul’s Epistles entirely, of course, as they accept those useful
verses, most famously Galatians 3:28, that they can take out of context to support
some view one suspects they already hold for other reasons.

Those who think this way often divide Jesus the gentle prophet of inclusive
love (or however the favorite Jesus of the moment is described) from St. Paul
the rule-maker, and sometimes also divide St. Paul the apostle of freedom from
St. Paul the unreformed Pharisee. Sometimes they simply talk a lot about Jesus
and pretend that St. Paul did not exist. The first tactic seems to have been
the more popular some decades ago, while the latter seems now to be the more
popular of the two. It is certainly shrewder to forget to invite St. Paul to
the party than to invite him and then pick a fight with him in front of the
guests.

A few years ago, Virginia Theological Seminary decided to admit students living
in sodomitical relationships and to let them live together on campus, if their
sponsoring bishops approved. They replaced their catalogue’s “Policy
Statement on Norms of Sexual Behavior” with one called “A Call to
a Holy Life,” which the dean called “more in keeping with the biblical
balance of the Christian tradition.”

The new call began by saying that “trustees, faculty and students of the
Seminary community are expected to be wholesome examples of persons called to
a holy life.” This life it defined as “not an achievement but a
gift of God’s grace that comes to those whose lives are grounded in Holy
Scripture, enriched and disciplined in the community of faith, and focused on
Christ as the companion and end of life’s pilgrimage.”

It sounds terribly religious. It is “focused on Christ,” after all.
It is just not Christian.

The Explanation

To explain the absence of St. Paul from their teaching, should anyone object,
these people will often say that they are preaching the “core” or
the “center” of the Faith, the part that really matters. The more
sophisticated may explain that they read the New Testament through Jesus, that
their hermeneutic is “Christological,” but that the Jesus they follow
is one freed from the distortions the Gospel writers inevitably added. If they
are conservative, they may say that they are “keeping the main thing the
main thing,” are not letting themselves and their parishes be distracted
by “issues,” and are “focusing on the gospel.”

This is, in a sense, true. St. Paul defines his own mission as “I preach
Christ, and him crucified,” not “I have instructions for you about
sexuality and headship and similar subjects.” The Christian looks always
to Christ and therefore listens to his words as recorded in the four Gospels.
He does read the New Testament through Jesus and believe him the center of the
faith.

But he looks also to those who speak for the Lord with his authority. The Christian
who claims to love Jesus but ignores or spurns his spokesmen is like a soldier
going into battle having pledged obedience to the general but refusing to take
orders from the captains and lieutenants he has put in command. The officers
are not only the general’s deputies but also the men whose job it is to
relay the details that effect his wider vision and plan. Their commands are
his commands.

The biblical revelation is, for Christians, a whole. It is still such, officially,
even for mainline Christians: In the eucharistic Liturgy of most churches, the
reader declares at the end of each lesson, Old Testament and Epistle as well
as Gospel, “The word of the Lord.” (I am told that in some Episcopal
seminaries students have reverted to using the old Prayer Book’s “Here
ends the lesson” when they don’t approve of it.)

The Bible is all of a piece: a very complex piece, obviously, and one in which
the relations of the parts are not always obvious (people still argue over the
relation of Paul on faith to James on works), and in which some parts seem to
have no purpose at all (most preachers I’ve heard just skip over the genealogies).
This complexity does not mean, as modern scholars often assume, that the revelation
is incoherent and contradictory. It may be, as Christians believe, subtle and
sophisticated, its unity only partly visible to fallen man.

The Christian responds to this complexity not by choosing what he will accept
and what he won’t—for this is all the man who separates the Gospels
from the Epistles is doing—but by studying and obeying the texts, and
thus coming to understand them more deeply and surely and to see something of
the unity beneath or behind the diversity. The unlearned and the young in the
Faith can borrow from the learning and wisdom of others, who can explain the
agreement of Paul and James and the reasons for the genealogies.

One can reject this idea of Scripture. One can, with perfect logic, separate
the Gospels from the Epistles, and even parts of the Gospels from the rest of
the Gospels. There is no intrinsic reason to read the Bible as Christians have
always read it. You can, if you want, treat the Bible as a collection of texts
to be reviewed and used as you think best.

It is perfectly rational to claim, as the sort of liberal we are discussing
does, that Jesus himself was a special revelation of God’s love for man,
which can be seen in the Gospels (imperfect as they are) but was badly distorted
in the Epistles, especially those of St. Paul, who could (says the liberal)
rise to the heights of Galatians 3:28 but sink to the depths of Romans 1:26.
One can do this and retain a religion in shape and language still Christian,
still Christian enough, anyway, to hold pastoral cures and theological chairs.

Separating St. Paul

I suspect such people separate Jesus from St. Paul because they do not want
to obey the rule of life Paul gives us, and they do not want to believe that
Jesus would agree with him. It is not an easy rule in any age, and in ours it
can be a costly one, socially and professionally. You will make those at a dinner
party in most suburbs flinch by saying of homosexual people what St. Paul says
of them in Romans 1, and if you are a cleric you will risk your future by treating
the matter as urgently as the apostle suggests. You will upset many conservative
Christians by speaking in the Pauline mode, because such speech is too pointed,
too stark, too direct, too divisive.

Faced with such demands as St. Paul makes, people naturally turn away from their
source, as one instinctively avoids the eyes of anyone who has just asked for
volunteers. The shrewder ones will start talking ever more loudly about the
Lord so that others will not notice they have turned their backs on his servant
St. Paul.

That is the obvious reason, but my colleague Steven Hutchens has noted another.
“There is,” he adds, “the absolute necessity of using truth
to promulgate the lie. We should not be surprised when we see them appear together.”
In these cases, a perversion of Christianity is best conveyed while talking
fervently of Jesus.

Orthodox Christians look to Jesus and so look to St. Paul, and listen to St.
Paul because he reliably points us to Jesus. We assume that God gave us the
Epistles as well as the Gospels, because the Epistles tell us something the
Gospels do not, or make clear something we would not always see rightly in the
Gospels. Of course, a man stranded on an island with only the four Gospels,
or even just one Gospel, would know what Jesus has done for him and would have
a very good idea of what Jesus expects of him. But he would not know everything
Jesus expected of him, and not everything he knew would he know confidently
and accurately.

In the Gospels we meet Jesus himself. They tell Jesus’ story, and storytellers
cannot include everything their subject did or said. In the Epistles we hear
people who knew Jesus much better than we do tell us what he said, or would
have said, about this, that, and the other problem we must solve. In them we
have the narrative turned into a theology.

To take the most contentious issue of the moment, Jesus did not say (or is not
recorded as saying) anything about homosexuality, the practice of sodomy being
so thoroughly unthinkable to the Jews of the day as not to need mentioning.
Left on our own, with only the four Gospels to tell us what Jesus wants, we
could easily assume that a man may lie with a man as with a woman (in Leviticus’
practical definition) and in doing so express the love that Jesus did talk about
and reject the legalism he condemned.

We would be wrong, but ours would be a plausible error, given the information
we have in the Gospels alone. St. Paul’s exposition clarifies the question
for us beyond mistake or dispute. (I know some do dispute it, but they can only
do so by distorting Paul’s message in the way they accuse Paul of distorting
Jesus’.)

A Rule for Discernment

Let me suggest a rule for discernment: A man who habitually speaks of Jesus
Christ without also speaking of St. Paul and the other New Testament writers
is not speaking as a Christian, no matter how orthodox his view of the Lord.
He is not speaking as a Christian though he hold high office in a Christian
body—and indeed he may have risen to such heights because he left out
of his teaching most of the words of the controversial and discomforting St.
Paul.

In other words, a man who proclaims the most thorough belief in the historical
facts described in the Gospels and proclaimed in the Creed but neglects, ignores,
doubts, or rejects the implications of those facts as drawn out in the Epistles
is not an orthodox Christian. He may love the Lord, or seem to, but he does
not also love St. Paul and the rest, and he who does not love St. Paul and the
rest does not love the Lord who became man in first-century Palestine, but an
image he has adapted to his own desires.

He may well be an accredited shepherd with many years’ experience, but
he is not following the Shepherd’s Manual. He is rewriting it as he wishes,
in the light, he thinks, of his greater knowledge and experience. It was written
for primitive sheep, not the highly evolved sheep of today, and reflects the
ancient shepherd’s simplistic understanding of wolves, not the insight
of the modern shepherd. The modern shepherd understands that the wolves are
seeking the one truth in their own way and must be affirmed in their personal
journey, and that the shepherd’s traditional requirement to protect the
sheep and the wolves’ desire to eat them must be held in creative tension
till both come to see that the answer is found in a synthesis of their views,
because each needs the other to be whole.

This shepherd is worse than a hireling, who runs away when danger threatens
the flock and leaves the sheep who have been entrusted to him to the wolves.
Hirelings are adequate shepherds as long as they do not have to risk their life.
They hate wolves, even if they will not fight them. The shepherd who rejects
the Epistles is in league with the wolves. He has accepted their rules for the
care of sheep. In exchange for their friendship, he asks only that he be allowed
to defend the sheep at selected times during the day, which permission the wolves
are usually happy to grant, as long as their access to dinner is not unduly
restricted.

The Scripture is a whole. It is all of a piece. It is a canon. Through St. Paul
and St. John and St. Peter and the rest we hear our Lord speaking. The wise
Christian, therefore, will not follow the shepherd who does not himself follow
St. Paul and St. John and St. Peter and the rest. He will shun the man who talks
in very traditional terms about the Lord but ignores or rejects the Epistles.

He who loves the General will obey his captains, even when they command what
he does not like or want, and even when the wolves threaten. The man who disobeys
the captains, though he has a picture of the general tattooed on his chest,
is no friend of the general’s, but a traitor. •

This is the first in a series of three Views on liberalism.

David Mills , former editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things, is a senior editor of The Stream and columnist for several Catholic publications. His last book is Discovering Mary. He and his family attend St. Joseph's Church in Corapolis, PA.

“St. Paul the Eccentric” first appeared in the October 2002 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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